GO ELECTRIC

We’re gliding along like a swan in the dark infuriating baffled drivers. We’re low on charge, less than twelve miles left, but that’s an estimation —it’s not linear, but energetic, like we are. And how stupid they seem, tooting their horns ! The old world accelerates on by in its demise, insane in its sanity, heartless in its vanity.

We’re from the future, re-entering history.

Meanwhile we know every curve, every crest of hill and slight descent…on our way to the one big descent that might just be our rescue, tripping these white dashboard dots into the green, re-charging. You can be sure we don’t fancy being stranded in this first freezing night of late autumn as the leaves hang waiting finally to release.

You click your window down to wave another driver on as I scrub at the fogged windscreen with a cloth to save battery; willing us to continue— we’re going to get there; somehow I just know it. We joke about our own electricity, and having pedals. Faith is: strangely, there’s no arguing about it.

We crawl to the hill’s edge—exhaling to its plunge as we dive…you dip the lights slowing into eco-mode…no one, thankgod, behind us.

Remember the women back at the garage who could not comprehend my question assuming I want to plug in some kind of toy. I repeat, we have an electric car. No, she finally says, abruptly saving face.

Imagine, we are from the future visiting planet earth on a mundane mid-week evening; she stares at me like the Man who Fell to Earth.

We are from a future we can only believe in uncertain of its destiny—will we really get there ? Down the winding hill to the long flat stretch at the edge of industrialization which limps on for miles until we finally reach the town, Bethlehem-Stroud rolling downhill to Ecotricity: nothing left pulling across a mini-roundabout like a giant full stop, and onto their forecourt: swan landing.

You try to figure out their locked pump as I pace with your iPhone, but the app doesn’t connect. A drunk appears across the road shouting shirtless, his bare torso a dare against the cold. It doesn’t matter, we’re going to leave it here frog-marching through the freezing air back to the blessing of central heating unlike the other half of our humanity those same cars are accelerating past.

No time to feel anything but warmth, heat, sleep in these migrant days before the dawning as we contemplate our escape—